Numerous studies are interested in the measurement of similarity between images on the basis of attributes assigned to the images. A certain number of them are now defined in the MPEG-7 standard. The invention is interested in particular in the so-called structural attributes. For example, in the latest version of the standard, an attribute of contour type is defined. It is extracted locally from blocks of images on the basis of Gabor filters.
The attributes known from the prior art or proposed in the MPEG-7 standard and the algorithms for processing these attributes for measuring similarity, do not however make it possible, for certain types of sequences, to detect similar images in a satisfactory manner, in so far as they do not take account either of the image in its entirety, or of the details in the image. With a view to clustering images extracted from a video, the similarity measurement must be able to convey the fact that several images correspond to one and the same scene, characterized by a unity of place. An information item characterizing solely the details of the image is not sufficient to fulfil this task. On the other hand an information item characterizing the image solely in its entirety may prove to be unsuitable in the case of partial modification of the staging of the scene, for example by modification of the background of the scene.